> Skip the nonsense and just check your dependencies in directly to your repo.
Haha, no.
That would increase the size of the repository greatly. Ideally, you would want a local proxy where the dependencies are downloaded and managed or tarball the node_modules and save it in some artifacts manager, server, or s3 bucket
What's the problem with a big repository? The files still need to be downloaded from somewhere. It's mostly just text anyway so no big blobs which is usually what causes git to choke.
For that one-off occasion when you are on 3G, have a new computer without an older clone, and need to edit files without compiling the project (which would have required npm install anyway), there is git partial clone.
Does npm have a shared cache if you have several projects using the same dependencies?
Haha, no.
That would increase the size of the repository greatly. Ideally, you would want a local proxy where the dependencies are downloaded and managed or tarball the node_modules and save it in some artifacts manager, server, or s3 bucket